This specification relates generally to associating network accessible resources with entities in the context of digital information retrieval.
A resource can be any type of digital information that is accessible over a network. Examples of resources include network accessible documents, scholarly articles, web pages, videos, audio files, applications, images, books, magazines, news articles, emails, blogs, and patents. Resources typically are linked. One web page, for example, can include a link to another web page. A scholarly article can reference one or more other articles.
An entity represents one or more people and, moreover, can be described by one or more resources. Examples of entities include a particular person, a group of people, one or more groups in a social network, a particular company or groups of companies, and any organization of one or more people. An entity can be either generic, e.g., a U.S. president, or it can be particular, e.g., President George Washington.
A corpus of digital information, examples of which include the Internet and its subset, can contain various types of resources. Moreover, resources typically are or can be associated with one or more entities. For example, scholarly articles available on the Internet are resources that can be associated with their authors, videos are resources that can be associated with the persons who created or posted the videos, images are resources that can be associated with the persons shown in the images, and news articles are resources that can be associated with persons the articles describe.